Care Personally, Challenge Directly: Kim Scott on Making Feedback a Team Superpower

Kim Scott defines Radical Candor as what happens when you care personally and challenge directly at the same time. She draws it as a two-by-two with care personally on the vertical axis and challenge directly on the horizontal. Forgetting to show care while challenging produces what she calls obnoxious aggression, which hurts people and is also inefficient, because someone in fight-or-flight mode cannot hear you.

When people realise they have been a jerk, Scott says, the instinct is often to retreat on challenge, pretending to agree, which lands in manipulative insincerity. The most common failure is different, though. Most people try to be nice, so they remember to care but hold back something the other person would be better off knowing. That is ruinous empathy.

Scott says 90% of us make 90% of our mistakes in the ruinous empathy bucket, but she offers some self-criticism of her own framework: it is easier to notice ruinous empathy than self-protective insincerity or frustration-driven aggression. She wants people to use the grid as a compass for specific conversations, not as a way to judge themselves or others harshly.

Scott tells a story from 2004, shortly after she joined Google. She presented AdSense results to the founders and the CEO, with one founder on an elliptical trainer in a bright blue unitard and the CEO answering emails. The numbers were so good that the CEO almost fell off his chair, and she walked out thinking she was a genius.

Her boss pulled her aside, started with what went well, and then said Scott had said "um" a lot. Scott brushed it off, and again when offered a speech coach. Only when her boss said it made her sound stupid did she listen. She calls that the kindest thing her boss could have done, because her boss knew her well enough to know she would not act otherwise.

Scott says her boss earned that right by caring personally, for instance sending her home to be with her family when her father was diagnosed with cancer. She notes that relationships do not scale, but culture does: leaders who show real care to their direct reports encourage them to do the same for their teams.

Scott resists giving scripts, since anyone using her words would sound like Kim Scott rather than themselves. Instead she offers principles that apply to praise as much as criticism, and says praise is even more important than criticism. She prefers the word "candor" to "truth", because candor implies a dialogue: here is how I see it, and I am curious how you see it.

Her mnemonic is HHIIPPP: be humble, be helpful, give feedback immediately, in person or at least synchronously, praise in public, criticise in private, and never comment on personality. She recommends the phone over video, citing evidence that facial expressions carry more noise than signal. Slack, she says, is "a feedback train wreck waiting to happen".

For the content of feedback she uses CORE: context, observation, result and next step. In the "um" story that was in the meeting, you said um every third word, it made you sound stupid, so go see the speech coach. She jokes that she first called it CORN, then dropped the name after learning about TikTok shorthand.

To illustrate ruinous empathy, Scott describes Bob, a charming, funny new hire whose work was full of sloppy mistakes. For ten months she told him things like "this is a great start" and "maybe make it a little better". She says part of the cause was ruinous empathy, not wanting to hurt his feelings, and part was manipulative insincerity, worrying about her own reputation if he got upset.

Meanwhile the team's deliverables slipped because they had to redo Bob's work, and Scott realised her best performers would leave. When she finally had the conversation, Bob asked why no one had told him, saying he thought everyone cared about him. By not telling him she had made it unavoidable to fire him.

Lenny notes that this shows the cost to high performers, and Scott agrees: you either help someone excel on your team or help them find a job where they can, because everyone can do great work somewhere. She adds that fear of tears was probably more about her fear than what would have happened.

Lenny describes himself as a recovering people-pleaser and asks how to get past the need to be liked. Scott says it helped to realise her job was not to be liked but to care about others and get out of her own head. She also describes how the likability-competence bias that many women face pushed her, early in her career, toward holding back directness.

Replaying the Bob situation, she would have addressed it the first time he handed in work with shame in his eyes, tentatively asking whether he was happy with it and admitting she could be misreading him. If he insisted it was great, she would point out every problem and show him the pattern. She also tells herself that demonstrating care matters more than being liked.

Scott says another way managers show care is meaningful career conversations. She suggests three 45-minute talks: one about the person's past, one about their dreams for the future, and a third to build a career action plan covering skills, introductions and tweaks to the job. She recommends Russ Laraway's book *When They Win, You Win* for more.

Answering a listener's question about cultures that resist directness, Scott says there is an order of operations: start by soliciting criticism, which improves the relationship enough to make giving it easier. "Do you have any feedback for me?" gets "everything's fine". Her go-to is "What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?", but each person needs a question that sounds like them. A CEO she coached prefers "Tell me why I'm wrong", though some on her team found it too aggressive.

Managers should budget five minutes at the end of each one-on-one to ask, and also ask cross-functional peers and their boss, varying the wording so it does not sound rote. Lenny's version is "What's one way I could help you be more successful?", while Scott's co-founder Jason Rosoff asks what he could have done this week. Scott almost never accepts "no", and if someone is put on the spot she asks them to notice something for next time.

Because there is "no such thing as emotional Novocaine", the next step is to embrace the discomfort by closing your mouth and counting to six. Then listen to understand rather than respond, perhaps with follow-up questions. She recalls her daughter saying "I wish you weren't the Radical Candor lady", which she misread as wanting more time, when the daughter actually wished she would mind her own business.

The final step is to reward the candor, since giving feedback is a huge risk, especially for an employee. Fix the problem visibly, tell people you did, and ask whether you over- or under-corrected. If you disagree, find the 5-10% you agree with, say you will think about the rest, and come back with a respectful explanation: it is unspoken disagreement, not disagreement, that harms relationships.

Lenny asks whether this is too much work for a leader. Scott says it is far less work than the cost of not doing it, as the Bob story shows. Soliciting feedback fits into the one-on-one you already have, and the two-minute "moments of management" can happen as you walk to the next meeting. She suggests shorter meetings, such as 25 and 50 minutes, or being willing to be late.

For employees, the order of operations is the same up, down and sideways: solicit feedback, offer praise as well as criticism, and gauge how it lands. Scott points out that bosses need praise too, and that it is a better tool than criticism for getting them to do more of what you like. She advises starting from a neutral place rather than the outer edge of challenge.

When the other person looks sad, she says, move up on care by saying maybe you did not put it the best way, without retracting the message. If they get mad, get "curious, not furious". Pulling words back sends you into ruinous empathy and leaves them both sad and confused.

Asked how to change leaders with low self-awareness who think obnoxious aggression is the only way, Scott advises explaining the impact they have and appealing to their enlightened self-interest. Most are better at hiding care than lacking it, and some think they are not supposed to care. She starts by sharing stories of her own times acting like a jerk and then asking them for theirs. Truly psychopathic managers, she says, should not manage.

She calls Bridgewater's approach, in which feedback is given publicly in meetings and recorded, deep, dark obnoxious aggression. She recounts an anecdote of a woman piled on until she cried, with the recording emailed company-wide. Scott says she counted only four or five pages about caring for people in Ray Dalio's *Principles*, and recommends the book *The Fund*.

To the argument that Steve Jobs and Elon Musk succeeded anyway, Scott says Jobs built deep relationships, citing Tim Cook offering to give him part of his liver. Radical candor is measured at the listener's ear, so blunt exchanges inside real relationships may be understood as care, though she admits her own "dumb ass" joke with a long-time colleague silenced others. The idea that you must choose between jerk and nice-but-incompetent is a false dichotomy.

On finding an authentic leadership style, Scott says she grew up in the South and as a woman was not taught to challenge directly. What she holds on to is fundamental kindness, and the realisation that in the long run it is unkind not to tell someone about a mistake. She encourages leaders to find their own Bob story, and to focus on what the person wants, such as a promotion that depends on changing how they talk to colleagues.

Scott says what frustrates her about how people use the book is people charging in with "in the spirit of Radical Candor" and being jerks. Her second point is the feedback she got from a CEO colleague, one of few Black women CEOs in tech, who said colleagues called her an angry Black woman at the mildest criticism. That conversation made Scott realise she had failed to be an upstander and had been in denial about bias, prejudice and bullying, including her own.

That led to her next book, *Radical Respect*, due out in May. It has chapters on what leaders can do, what to do if you are harmed by bias or bullying, how to be an upstander, and how to be part of the solution if you are the culprit. Scott says everyone is responsible for a more respectful workplace.

Scott's concrete homework is to write down your go-to feedback question, practise it in the mirror and with a friend, and put five minutes in your calendar to ask someone, or add it to the bottom of your next one-on-one agenda. Her closing message is that you do not have to choose between being successful and being a jerk, because you can be a successful kind person.

In the lightning round she recommends reading more novels to build compassion and mentions Middlemarch, Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf. Her favourite interview question is "tell me the story of your career", which reveals how people handle setbacks and whether they own their mistakes. Her favourite motto comes from a stranger who stopped her walking her dog in Manhattan: "It's not mean. It's clear."

She also explains that her first management job was running a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow, where hiring cutters taught her that what she could offer, and the state could not, was to care about them. That moment convinced her that management matters and that to be good at it you have to care.